SOURCE: James, Nick. Review of King of the Hill, by Steven Soderbergh. Sight and Sound 4, no. 1 (January 1994): 48.

In the following mixed review, James argues that King of the Hill is a conventional coming-of-age tale.

The career of Steven Soderbergh highlights the degree to which film reviewing in Britain has to take reputations on trust. All we have seen of his work in this country is his debut, the Cannes Palme d'Or winner sex, lies, and videotape, which was greeted as a critical and popular triumph of economical film making. Yet Soderbergh's reputation is at a low ebb, simply because consensus has it that his follow-up—the reputedly bizarre and bigger-budgeted Kafka—is unreleasable. His third feature King of the Hill therefore has a lot riding on it, in that the former young upstart is perceived as needing a comeback to recoup his bankability.

That Soderbergh should choose perhaps...